


The Fabric of Reality, or Our Dear Lady of Fate

by PunJedi



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, Gen, One Shot, we love one (1) goddess of fate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-09
Updated: 2019-12-09
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:42:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21737788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PunJedi/pseuds/PunJedi
Summary: Istus is the goddess of fate; as such, she is loved, hated, feared, and worshipped in turn. Istus is timeless, eternal. She is radiant.She knits, and waits, and loves. She loves three in particular; three most of all. (Three birds, out of seven.)Or, how the goddess of fate took a shine to three horny boys.They say there’s a tragic beauty about her.
Relationships: Istus & Tres Horny Boys
Comments: 7
Kudos: 32





	The Fabric of Reality, or Our Dear Lady of Fate

**Author's Note:**

> "You're going to be amazing" _wrecked_ me, and this somehow shot out of my mind at warp speed in response. Short and sweet and rambling, essentially a love letter to and from our dear lady of fate.  
> Thanks for reading! :)

They say there’s a tragic beauty about her.

The way she hides her face behind a handmade veil.  _ Is it scarred? _ they ask.  _ Disfigured? Why does she hide herself? _ But such speculation is idle, and baseless. She is not hideous by mortal terms, though some find her so; neither is she particularly lovely, though the same can be said there. Still, the whispers.

(She wears a veil because she cannot keep a straight face. Her joy and her sadness and her anger are too bright to expose the world to.)

There’s tragedy in how she hobbles, smooth, young hands wrapped around a gnarled wooden cane. There’s beauty in the weft and warp of her clothing; every hue burns in space, vivacity sustained by the nearby pulse of a goddess. Her voice wavers between creaking and honey-silk; her voice wavers between grief-sick and ebullient; her voice wavers between the tsunami crash and the wisp of salt spray; her voice is warm.

She is tragically beautiful, because some loathe her, and some would die in her name, but none know her.

…At least, none of her foster children, her adopted worlds brought into the soft fold of her cloth. None of the elders she’d known long before their birth, nor the babes she knows the future-truth of.

…At least, none but three.

They are a fighter, a wizard, and a cleric.

They are a protector, a twin, and a peacemaker.

They are three parts of one whole, three birds in one flock, and they are effervescent.

Can you blame her, our dear Lady of Fate, for coming closer?

* * *

She begins with a nudge. A bit of dark yarn, sparking like crystal, woven in quickly and tightly and surely, out of her hands and into one old woman’s mouth. The baker woman does not need her for much, but this one—this one is crucial. This one is hungry, but who better to feed it than a goddess and an oracle-baker.

Her only-child twin does not understand, but the seed is important. Even she cannot spring a tree from bedrock and dead earth.

His seed will be a tree: her weaving is a tree with two branches, a road that forks, a river and its tributaries. One side meets ash and the other tar, and both are consumed. She does not have enough gray and black yarn to follow it past its conclusion, so thus it would conclude. Ash and silt and oil spills, sick and dead and hollow.

In this moment of crisis, stuck on the withering tree and the crumbling path and the surging river, remember:  _ there is always a third option. _

Her third option exists in the tentative colors that the apocalypse has not used or touched, every shade but gray and beige and coal black, every color but nauseating pulsing red, yellow, blue, green. It exists in a burst of white light, she thinks, and allows herself satisfaction.

(Seven hues knit together make white. Seven souls knit together make bonds strong enough to hold reality together. Our Lady of Fate smiles; sometimes coincidences are just that, but never let it be said that Fate doesn’t love irony. She smiles, veiled, or it would blot out the sun.)

But that one sparking dark yarn of crystal, that one sip of salvation from another’s palms, cannot sate her. As moths are drawn and ever will be to the gentle summons of the moon, our Lady cannot resist the starshine of these three, the sunlight pouring from them.

What wonderful creations. What impossible ones.

In her wonderful, impossible, out-of-time temple, she meets them. Her eyes well with tears at the sight of them—but she is veiled, and they cannot see, or they would drown in the dew of her joy. She cannot keep a straight face.

(Neither can they, her foolish, clever, laughing three. She makes sure to weave in sun-orange, and mirth-yellow while they talk; they will need every spare scrap. She is running out of bright shades, but the future past the brightest day only begs sweet pastels and muted tones. …At least for now.)

Her three still do not know; their wings are clipped and their silver-thread bonds tangled and knotted up. It makes her mourn to think of, a grief that drips salt down her chin, but: that is in their future, no matter the fork they take. That is their future. They are in today; a today that has been locked in place, locked into destruction.

She blesses them, her sun-flame sons, these absurd and singular boys. They see nothing more than the gifts she places in their hands—except, perhaps, the owl, wiser in an untouchable way, irreverent yet devoted—but she will be watching them and their threads, their yarns. When this is over, she thinks, they will have such stories to tell. They will have such yarns to spin, she thinks, for Fate loves irony, and she will still be sitting, watching, needles bobbing, happier than the stars at moonrise.

(Her smile is kept underneath her veil, or it would blot out the sun.)

* * *

The split tree and path and river shift and spread, choices made and eliminated, futures demolished. Ash and tar and a bursting globe of energy, a thin line between whole spectrums and the void shot through. Our Lady of Fate’s needles flash—as do her eyes.

Sight sets in.

She sees seven birds. Her eyes are white and blind and limitless. Pearly color shifts on their surface like a snowy oil slick, pure where it shouldn’t be possible—you could see whole realities in the smooth refraction of kaleidoscope irises, if they weren’t hidden behind a veil. And our dear Lady of Fate, she of the tragic beauty… she stares and she watches and she  _ sees _ .

Seven birds, and a silver arrowhead, and a horrible hunger threaded through with light.

But what beautiful hues they all shine in. What a tapestry they’ll create.

Her fingers are already flying, flying like the birds. ( _ Her _ birds, she’s begun to call them. They’re all hers, hers even before they’re the Raven’s, but these seven are other. These seven are special.)

Gone is the tree and its ash, gone is the path and its rubble, gone is the river and its tacky tar stains. Instead is the maw, dark and gaping and ravenous, and instead are the birds, shining spectrums and soaring.

She sees seven birds. The twin cockatoos. The mourning dove. The golden eagle. The sandhill crane. The horned owl. The albatross.

Every hue of thread is used in their flight path, their trajectory, their wingspan and the pearl-sheen of their feathers. They create prisms; they  _ are _ the prism, a single beam of white hope split into seven fundamental shades, from which all else are formed.

She sees seven hues. The fire orange. The umbrella purple. The lover’s robe-red. The fisher’s blue. The indigo of empty space. The grass-god’s green. The pale-yellow blur of stars smearing past.

She sees seven birds.

_ She sees seven birds. _

(Behind her veil, she weeps for the beauty of them.)

(They say  _ she _ is of the tragic beauty—but Fate loves irony.)

* * *

It is the end of things, and the rebirth, for she needs no more gray thread—only the pale pastels of the spring flowers and the soft muted tones of the yawning, waking sun. That will come, after one last burst—of time, of color, of light.

Her three birds, her laughing boys… they make the choice that can save everything, and they do it with the raw joy they started with, and behind her veil the sight is  _ blinding _ . But it is nothing compared to the battle raging; it is nothing compared to the radiance of seven birds and seven hues and seven singular individuals.

Her tapestry floods back with color as she loosens her knot in time; despite the encroaching darkness, it is dazzling. One of her sons smacks her palms,  _ down low _ , and grins, and she cannot help the laugh bubbling up, spilling out from underneath her veil like splashes of sunlight. There is nothing tragic in her elation, and everything beautiful.

She leaves them to their final task, for she must; she doesn’t fear for them. She cares, yes, and loves them—but fear has no sick strands trapped in her weaving, not today, not in this time. She leaves, because she can afford to.

And as she fades—she whispers like a thunderstorm, murmurs like an earthquake, wishes like meteors tearing blazing streaks through the atmosphere—into their minds and into their  _ souls _ , where it embeds like truth, a knitting needle to the heart—they hear it as they hear their brother and their sister, and as they hear their goddess, and as they hear a bard’s song told in blue-green brilliance:

_ You’re going to be  _ amazing.

**Author's Note:**

> She's right, you know.


End file.
